


had i not known

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Daisy Johnson is flawless, F/M, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, Painkillers, Romance, poetic bs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2017-02-07
Packaged: 2018-09-22 18:00:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9618881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: Daisy gets hurt during a mission and while the painkillers work their magic Coulson gets to hear some interesting stuff.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BrilliantlyHorrid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrilliantlyHorrid/gifts).



The first thing he thinks about - when he can think about something else other than _LET’S GET OUT! LET’S GET OUT!_ as a piercing scream in his own voice inside his head - is that it’s really disturbing how quiet Daisy can keep through excruciating pain. The kind of pain she’s in, Coulson has seen seasoned agents shouting because of something like that. 

“What the hell was that?” he asks, not sure if he is asking himself or Mack or-

“Seems like the Watchdogs have upped their anti-Quake game,” Daisy says, each word sounding like torture, like someone is putting needles under her nails with each syllable.

Coulson can’t think about that right now. About this new weapon and what it’s done to Daisy’s arm, to the nerves in her arm.

He can’t think about how she doesn’t make a noise the whole 20-min journey, and only lets out a whimper when they arrive at the cabin and when they are helping her through the threshold her arm accidentally bumps into the doorframe.

“A cabin in the woods, uh?” Mack complains, only they have managed to get Daisy to the bedroom. Coulson has the feeling the comment has to do with the man’s love/hate relationship with horror movies, more than an strategic opinion on Coulson’s choice of safehouse.

“Let’s just hope the first aid kit is full,” he replies, gesturing to Mack so that he’ll go to the bathroom and find out, while he stays with Daisy.

They had to bolt as they were, no time to go back to the van for supplies, they bandaged Daisy’s hand with what they had on them and run. With the Watchdogs on their trail and outnumbering them they couldn’t risk leading them straight back to the extraction point. A safehouse was the only idea Coulson was able to come up with. Mack had agreed and Daisy was in no state to agree or disagree - if she had been, a pack of Watchdogs wouldn’t have been such a threat. Coulson and Mack felt powerless, inadequate, their only strategy was to keep Daisy safe.

Now Daisy is in his arms, trying hard not to writhe or make a sound, and the moments waiting for Mack to come back from the bathroom, the moments listening to his heavy familiar steps and he checks cupboards and cabinets, they spread horribly, they spread to infinites where Daisy is in pain and helpless.

But it’s only a few moments, Mack is quick, and comes back with a bag and a handful of stuff: he shows Coulson a few ampoules and a syringe. 

“I found painkillers, but they have to be hypo,” he says.

Coulson nods. “It’s usually better.”

“This is kind of heavy duty,” Mack says, looking at the drug, with a concerned frown.

“Look at her,” Coulson says. 

Mack does, wincing a bit. “I think heavy duty is what we want right now,” he agrees. He rips the wrapper on the syringe, while giving Coulson orders with a calm Coulson is grateful for. He feels paralyzed, unable to make a choice. “Lie her on her side, and pull down her pants.”

Daisy lets out a small, high-pitched moan when Mack gives her the shot on the upper leg. He also finds some clothes for her and he and Coulson get her out of her field suit with difficulty, as the drug starts relaxing her muscles and turning her into a limp weight.

“I keep forgetting her body is just regular human size,” Mack says as he slips Daisy’s arm through a t-shirt’s sleeve with the care of a friend, a partner, the care of someone as gentle as he is.

Coulson knows exactly what he means.

“In the field she looks so big and…”

“Indestructible?” Mack offers.

“Yeah.”

It’s unfair, he thinks as he finishes putting her left leg in the sweatpants. Daisy might be strong, but she is still as fragile as she used to be, before her powers.

The two men lie her carefully on the bed again.

“I’ll stay with her,” Coulson says, a little forceful, as if he feared Mack was going to fight him for it. As if he needed to be here, by her side, and anyone implying a different course of action is an enemy. It’s irrational, but Coulson can’t blame himself for irrational when he has watched Daisy writhe in pain for an hour.

“I think that’s a good idea,” Mack says, and disappears discreetly. In a few seconds Coulson hears him in the kitchen, washing something.

Coulson pulls up a chair next to the bed and waits for the painkillers to kick in, pulling the covers up her body, he watches the sweat on Daisy’s brow intently, looking for tiny, minutae evidence that the pain is subduing. Finally he gets them.

 

**&**

Half an hour later Daisy is in suspicious high spirits. Her nose and cheeks a more vivid color, not the pained pale Coulson watched the whole trip here.

“Was that Mack, with the…?” she makes a rather comical gesture that Coulson takes as signifying _syringe_ or shot.

“Yeah, that was Mack.”

“That hurt.”

Coulson smiles a bit, the slightly childish annoyance on Daisy’s tone pretty amusing. And he’s relieved she is not in pain anymore.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, patting her hand for a moment. Her skin is all sticky and hot.

“Mack is very nice,” Daisy says with a pensive expression. “He shouldn’t go doing that.”

“Mack is very nice indeed,” Coulson agrees.

“You’re very nice too,” Daisy says and then covers her mouth with her hands, as if he shouldn’t have heard that.

His smile widens. “Thank you.”

She shakes her head, mysteriously, for a moment. Then she looks down at her hands.

“I can’t feel my fingers,” she says. “I would like to never feel my fingers again.”

“Your hand will be fine in a couple of days,” he tells her, trying to be helpful, even though Daisy doesn’t look like she can process too much information right now.

He realizes the painkillers must have had some ingredient very much like those used for recreational purposes. Daisy is high. While he is glad to see her without pain Coulson starts feeling uncomfortable with this.

He realizes he has never seen Daisy drunk.

He has seen her drink, but he has never seen her drunk. He has seen her woozy or disoriented by life-saving drugs (he remembers trying to tell her the story after Quinn shot her, and he remembers Daisy kept falling asleep on important parts and he had to start again, and he didn’t mind, he was relieved she was alive, and he was anxious about what he had done to her). But he has never seen her high.

It feels like intruding. She’s vulnerable in a way she hasn’t chosen. And she hasn’t chosen Coulson as a witness, either. It makes her feel ashamed. He feels not-belonging in the scene. In a way it reminds him the first (and only) time he saw Fury drunk. It made Coulson feel like he was violating something sacred. Because Daisy - like Fury - is very careful with her vulnerability. She didn’t have a say in the matter.

“What did they use?”

“We don’t know yet.”

For a moment she gets this sobered up, dark expression.

“I’m glad it exists,” she says.

“What?” Coulson asks, confused.

“Something that can stop me.”

A cold shiver runs down his spine.

“No, Daisy, no…”

He doesn’t know what else to say. Just because she is proud of her powers and uses them to protect people he shouldn’t have assumed she doesn’t feel the old ambiguity anymore. And all the things she was made to do with those powers…

Coulson wraps his fingers around her arm, around the soft, hot skin. He can tell she’s a bit feverish. He runs his finger over her wrist, because he doesn’t have words to comfort her that aren’t trite or self-serving. Daisy still being scared of her own powers, after all this time, is part of the reason why she is the perfect person to have them.

“I like that,” she says, looking at his fingers, his slight gesture of comfort. “You don’t touch me anymore. We don’t touch anymore.”

Coulson hadn’t realized but the moment she says it he knows it’s true. Why don’t they touch anymore? Why doesn’t he touch her, hug her, comfort her? She was gone for so long, six months, he should have touched her when she came back, he wanted to. But it felt unfair to Daisy. Or at least he believed that.

She lets out a small sigh.

“No, no, let’s not go there.”

She suddenly starts scratching her neck and her shoulder. An allergic reaction? Coulson wonders. That would explain it. At least it doesn’t seem to be too bad.

She throws one arm around Coulson’s neck, tightly, and pulls him to her, until their cheeks are touching and they are supposed to be looking out in the same direction. Something about it makes Coulson want to chuckle, the way Daisy can’t quite make her limbs do what she wants, she is normally awkward but hides it so well, now she is flailing in a dorkish way that is unmistakably hers yet Coulson has never seen before.

“There are things we must not speak of,” she says, in a mysterious tone and Coulson thinks she is attempting an Eastern European accent, some kind of Bela Lugosi impersonation for a moment. She turns towards him, just as clumsily, so their noses bump. She doesn’t seem to mind, still gripping Coulson tight to her body. “Don’t you agree? That there are things we must not speak of.”

Without the dorky accent, this time.

“You can tell me anything,” Coulson says, half-regretting it because he doesn’t want to encourage her to say something she wouldn’t normally, something she might be embarrassed about later, but the words just come so naturally to him, the desire to let her know there’s nothing she should feel like she had to hide from him.

“Ssh, don’t speak so loud or he’ll hear,” Daisy replies with a tone of alarm.

“Who? Who is going to hear?”

Daisy gives him an eyeroll, like he is so very stupid. she punctuates it with a soft pat on the back. The closeness makes her conspiratory tone more effective.

“Coulson, of course.”

Coulson, of course.

He wonders if it would be a bad thing to contradict her, like waking someone up when they’re sleepwalking. Maybe it’s better to go along with it.

“Oh, him,” he says weakly, feeling like he is in some theatrical farce.

Daisy puts a finger on his mouth.

“He must never know.”

“Know what?”

She pulls back and gives her another “ _are you stupid or what_?” kind of look. 

“You know, that I’m in love with him,” she says casually. Then she makes a funny face. “That I _dig him_.”

Coulson freezes.

The painkillers must have caused an allergic reaction all right. Daisy would never… she would never think about him that way, just as he would never think about her that way.

“Why mustn't he hear?” he asks, hating himself a bit for his curiosity. Daisy doesn’t know what she is saying, she certainly doesn’t mean it, so why is he so curious.

Daisy gives out a huge sigh.

“Because he doesn’t feel the same,” she says. “And you-” she points her finger at him. “You know Coulson. He’s so-” Daisy makes a gesture with her hand he can’t decypher. “He would feel bad that I’m sad because he doesn’t love me. He would think he did something wrong and then I would feel even worse.”

She would never think about him that way, yet suddenly he feels guilty about something he said that Daisy never got to hear, something about her being like family to him, something he said to justify himself, because he was the cause of her suffering at the time.

And suddenly he is very aware that Daisy has her arm around him still, and that he has almost abandoned his chair to follow her up the bed. He feels like he is taking advantage.

 _Don’t, Phil,_ he tells himself, the fingers on the hand that is not holding Daisy digging into his palm, pleading with his curiosity until forming a fist. _Just don’t._

“Why are you sure he doesn’t feel that way?” he asks, trying to sound uninterested.

Daisy snorts.

“Please,” she says. “Plee-ish. He’s _Phil Coulson_ ,” she says, like that explains everything. “Me, I’m not, you know, _you_ know, me and Coulson, we’re not in the same… the same sport?”

She looks unconvinced.

“League?” Coulson offers.

“League!” she shouts, looking triumphant. “We’re not in the same league. He’s so great and I’m just… I’m only ever trouble. How would I deserve him? Ridic. Hey, I like that expression, _ridic_. I know it’s netspeak and I shouldn’t but… it’s funny. Ridic.”

Coulson is horrified. If there is even one part of Daisy that is telling the truth and she feels like somehow she is not worthy of being desired by someone like himself… the idea feels like a punch to the stomach.

Then Daisy pats his hair, tenderly, touchingly, distracting him.

“You promise never to tell him?” she asks. “Promise, please. He’s too nice. He doesn’t deserve this.”

“Of course, I won’t tell him.”

Daisy smiles. She moves her left hand to his face and presses her palm very tenderly against Coulson’s cheek. He realizes unfiltered Daisy is very tactile, and wonders if she would like to touch and be touched more than she gets to. Her thumb drops to the corner of his mouth, soft brushes.

“You’re very nice, too,” she says.

“Thanks.”

“You remind me of him, you know.”

“Coulson?”

“Yeah, him. You remind a bit of him,” she drops her hand and Coulson finds he misses the warmth. Then Daisy chuckles. “Though he is _a lot sexier_ than you.”

Coulson watches her giggle for a second and then collapse, looking blissful and innocent, over the pillows, with a soft thud.

 

**&**

“It seems like there’s a bottle of scotch in every safehouse,” Mack comments when Coulson walks into the kitchen. Coulson can tell by his tone that he somehow disapproves.

“I think it might be official SHIELD regulation,” he tells him with a tired smirk. He flattens some stray locks in his hair, trying not to remember how nice and strange it felt when Daisy run her fingers through, because again it feels like he doesn’t have the right to keep the memory of those things, because Daisy didn’t choose to do that.

Silently Mack offers to share a drink with him and Coulson accepts. They settle down on the coffee table, neither wanting to start to review the events of the day. Mack chooses something closer, easier, more important.

“She’s fine?” he asks.

Coulson nods. “Sleeping. The arm looks better. I think it’ll be okay.”

“I guess we can’t move her just yet.”

“Not just yet,” he says. Not with Watchdogs swarming around, with technology that can turn Daisy’s face into a grimace of pain, and her fingers fragile and useless. No, let’s stay here, he thinks, where it’s dark and safe.

“What the hell was that weapon, Coulson?”

“I don’t know.”

He feels like he is failing both daisy _and_ Mack by not knowing, by not having an easy solution. It feels shitty. It makes him feel small.

“Did it look like…?”

“Something SHIELD might have had a hand in creating? Yeah, probably.”

Mack shakes his hand. “No. Let’s just drink.”

An uncharacteristic remark. But Mack always has better ideas.

Coulson follows that lead.

In the early days there was a lot of investigating, a lot of theories about how to stop Daisy’s powers, how to neutralize them. Theories born out of concern for her, out of love. How careless he was, Coulson realizes. Asking Simmons to look into it. How heartlessly naive. And arrogant. Even if Watchdog’s knowledge of Inhuman biology doesn’t come from some obscure corner in a file buried in SHIELD’s servers, he feels like he should ask Daisy for forgiveness. Humans are so thoughtless. He feels shame now.

“You should probably take the couch,” Coulson says. “I can make do with the bath tub.”

Mack shrugs, his features softer and looser thanks to the adrenaline dropping and the alcohol. “Well, you are shorter so yeah, I’ll the couch.”

He drinks with Mack, in the thick comforting silence Mack is always able to give, like a gift. But he can’t stop thinking, from his shame, about Daisy’s small sad voice when she confessed she knew Coulson (this _Coulson_ , this oblivious this character that wasn’t him at the moment, because he was there sitting on Daisy’s bed, with her arm around his neck) wouldn’t love her back, and she accepted, because she didn’t deserve him.

“Mack?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember when you cut my arm off?” he asks.

Mack gives him an exhausted glare, like he’s thinking “ _this again?_ ” but he’s too polite to tell Coulson to fuck off about it.

“No, I mean, afterwards,” Coulson explains. “I don’t remember much. you and Fitz trying to stop the bleeding. I passed out and then I was in a Quinjet, on painkillers.”

“That was pretty much it,” Mack says, squirming in his seat, not wanting to talk about that. Even though he did nothing wrong. He saved his life, but Coulson understands. There will always be a kind of forced intimacy between the two men because of this. Mack will always be the person who cut off one of his limbs. Neither chose that kind of closeness, and sometimes it embarrasses them. 

“And the painkillers?” Coulson presses, letting Mack know this is not about what he did. “Did they have some strange effect on me?”

Mack frowns.

“What do you mean?”

He is ridiculous. _You are ridiculous_ , Coulson tells himself. Grinding Mack for information. Trying to figure out if a beautiful woman confessing her love to him is something real or chemically-induced.

“Did I say something weird?” he asks, anyway.

“Something weird?”

“Something that didn’t sound like me.”

“No, you drooled a lot. And moaned. You didn’t say much.”

“Uh.”

“Why? Did Daisy say something weird?”

Of course he is not going to rat her out, not even to get a second opinion out of it. And he also remembers how Daisy swore him to secrecy, even in her intoxicated state.

He wonders what Mack would say, he would probably just find it as ridiculous as Coulson, that Daisy could say he of all people is out of her league. He hadn’t thought of her like that before tonight (why can’t he stop thinking about it now, then?) and he has the feeling Mack hasn’t, either, but both men would probably agree that, on the contrary, Daisy is out of everyone’s league.

“No, no, she didn’t say anything weird. I was just curious.”

“Uh.”

He’s not sure if that non-committal noise means Mack believes him or he doesn’t.

 

**&**

She looks like an apparition, and at first coulson thinks that’s what she is. He thinks he might still be asleep.

The light is filtering through the window blinds, behind her, as she sits on the couch, in the same t-shirt and sweatpants he helped her into last night, and a blanket over her shoulders, and it’s still so early that the light around her is blue, unreal. It makes Coulson stop in his tracks for a moment, like he could see without being seen, but of course he can’t, and Daisy turns her head at the sound of his steps, and gives him a sad, mysterious smile.

“I let Mack have the bed for a couple of hours,” she says. “He looked like he needed it.”

Coulson makes a gesture, asking for permission to sit by her side. She nods.

“You should have probably gotten more rest,” he tells her. Her hand has a new bandage, which means that Mack changed it before accepting her generous offer. But he can’t tell if the injuries still hurt. Daisy has her good poker face on again.

She keeps silent for a moment.

(Coulson thinks, _decides_ that if she doesn’t bring up what she said last night he’ll keep her secret forever, even from herself)

Eventually: “I wanted to be up early. I had a lot of stuff to think about.”

“Like what?”

“Like I had to prepare a long apology to you.”

No small talk, she cuts to the chase. Even if it hurts. Coulson admires that in her.

“An apology,” he repeats.

“In case you were wondering, yeah, I remember every word I said last night,” she tells him.

She doesn’t sound mortified or embarrassed like Coulson has been expecting. It’s worse. She sounds guilty.

“I shouldn’t have done that to you,” she adds.

“Do that to me?”

“You need a coffee? Do you understand what I’m saying? Because I don’t think I can repeat it.”

“No, I understand,” he says. Then: “Well, not really.”

He watches her tug at the blanket over her shoulders, wrapping herself in it. It makes him think of watching her get hurt on the field, realizing that someone so strong can look so small for a moment. That you can admire both their strength and those moments in between.

“I know you are probably feeling bad thinking you’ve hurt me but listen,” Daisy says, sliding down on the couch, closer to him, looking at him with those big generous eyes like she fears he might be the one who needs comforting. “You did nothing wrong. It’s all on me.”

“Daisy, I-”

“You’ve probably spent all night trying to find a way to let me down gently,” she says. It’s only then that Coulson realizes that the thought hasn’t occurred to him at all. “But I’m telling you, Coulson, you don’t have to. I’m fine.”

 _You are such a fool_ , Coulson thinks, and it takes a moment to figure out he is not saying it to himself but to Daisy.

“You said I was out of your league. Please tell me those were the drugs talking,” She shrugs, turning her head away from him. “ _Daisy_?”

“What do you want me to say? You’re a decent guy in a world with few of those. You’re funny and smart and you care. You come from a good place, you’re so… human. I’m a screw up, a high school dropout whose parents are mass murderers.”

Coulson feels something big stuck in his throat, but it’s too big, it would tear him apart - because how can you tell Daisy all the wonderful things she is, all the reasons why anyone would love her, without letting it consume you, without spending the rest of your life on it?

“What? You think I’m perfect?”

She gives him a serious look.

“Perfect is overrated,” she says. “You’re good.”

“You are too,” he replies, stupidly, like a bad script. 

But not knowing how else to comfort her, knowing it’s nothing he can fix, Coulson puts his arms around Daisy and pulls her into a hug. She was right - why didn’t he touch her all this time? 

He strokes her back with one hand. Feeling her heartbeat between her shoulder blades like the flutter of wings.

“I miss it too,” he says into her neck. “Us touching. I’d like to touch you a lot more.”

He feels her freeze, and it’s like watching a nature documentary, the way some animals’ stillness is so supernatural, so eerie, because you realize for them staying still is a matter of life or death. He presses his mouth to her neck - not quite a kiss, because kisses have an ending. 

Are these feelings for her new or have they been here the whole time? And does it matter? That’s the thing, he decides. It doesn’t really matter. He feels it now. Would he have felt this way if he had never heard Daisy confess her own feelings? He has no idea but thank God for painkillers.

“Thank God for painkillers,” he whispers out loud, drinking kisses from her skin.

“Coulson,” she stops him. He still can’t meet her eyes so he keeps holding her. “You don’t have to do this, just because I said…”

He shakes his head slightly, his mouth touching the shoulder of her t-shirt.

“It’s not because of that,” he says.

Can’t Daisy conceive the idea of him wanting her for any other reason than pity, a sense of responsibility? Daisy is Daisy, he remembers, and it all makes sense. Everything she said while on painkillers, it all makes sense.

She grabs him by the shirt and pulls him away, forcing him to meet her eyes again.

“It’s not?” she asks, still incredulous, but there’s something in her voice, not hope, but like she’s begging.

Coulson never thought of her like that, until the moment he did and now he can’t stop. Which the same as saying he always thought of her like that. It’s not a straight line, it’s Daisy, the feeling spills, fills every crack, colors everything they’ve been through together. He kisses her, trying to get rid of that big thing stuck in his throat. Her lips feel dry against his mouth, and she stands there still, with her knee pressed against Coulson’s leg, and she’s not exactly unresponsive, more like afraid - afraid that this is a dream or a joke, or worse, that he is just going through with this for her sake. Coulson knows her well enough to know this is what she is thinking, feeling, right now. So he kisses her deeper and holds her closer.

When they pull away from each other that first time Daisy gives him a shy smile and he kisses her again, wanting that smile to widen, to stay. He thought finding out Daisy loved him like that, that he might love her as well, was extraordinary enough, but now there’s this; the mechanics of it, the warmth of it, the newness, and the skin and the way she draws a breath between kisses and the way her hand trembles on his shoulder, the way his own body reacts, clumsily, carefully and small, like an animal after winter, trying out its sleepy steps on the last trace of snow.

He is so soft with her, so much that his own tenderness shocks him, because he didn’t know it existed. How Daisy keeps inventing things inside of him that weren’t there before her.

She starts kissing back, with a shy excitement he finds familiar (Daisy always makes the leap, but never trusts the fall), _remember she loved you first_ Coulson repeats to himself, knowing it will be a long time before he can say the word out loud, a long time before he stops being afraid of the thing in his heart and his throat, of being torn apart. So he forces himself to stop thinking, to become hands; he slips his fingers under Daisy’s t-shirt and there he finds traces of yesterday’s fever, some more tenderness, and the fleeting memory of a teenage room he hasn’t walked into in so many years, when hands were everything. He moans into Daisy’s mouth, brushing the tip of his thumb under her ribcage and pulling her towards her, until her legs are resting on his lap. Daisy shivers (in a good way), and whimpers (in a good way) and grabs Coulson’s shoulder with one hand and pushes him away.

“Mack is in the next room,” she says, with stern eyebrows and a good impersonation of a schoolmistress.

Coulson smiles at the formality, his hands supporting her waist rather than wrapped around it.

“So much for rule-breaker Daisy, daring Daisy…”

“I’m not… either of those.”

He realizes she is using Mack as an excuse.

“Your arm hurts, doesn’t it?” he guesses.

She nods.

“I don’t want to do… this, us, while all I can think about is how much my hand hurts.”

“You could have told me that,” he says. Gently, because he knows Daisy doesn’t want people to know when she is in pain, like it might somehow bother them.

“I know,” she says, stroking his shoulder with her good hand, inviting more of his soft touch, anyway. He copies her gesture, his fingertips across the naked skin of her back.

Coulson looks around, only just realizing how the light has changed while they were talking, while they were kissing. It is not blue anymore, more like orange-ish, everything a bit warmer.

“It’s still early,” Coulson says. “I don’t know what stuff is in here but I can try to make us some breakfast.”

Daisy grabs the collar of his shirt, shaking her head. Her eyes are locked with his and there’s a dark pink color in her nose and cheeks, but it’s not the fever.

“I said not go all R-rated,” she tells him. “I didn’t say you should stop kissing me.”

Coulson nods, throws himself against her mouth, unafraid of the fall.

Breakfast can wait until the light changes again.


End file.
